Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Search Engine Marketing or Social Media?

Everyone likes the new shining
objects. So does the marketers, who started switching from, search engine
marketing to social media, and such trend followed by other marketers. Of
lately, there has been a shift or thinking to shift their Digital Marketing
focus from Search Engine Marketing to Social Media. Switching search to social
was a smart move? Can marketers rely completely on Social Media instead of
Search Engine?

Few years back, the companies
that shifted their Digital marketing focus from search engine to social media
are now bringing back the search engine marketing as the strategy that is the
part of Digital Marketing. The major question is, why did the search engine was
chosen again? It is because; the marketers didn't receive the kind of performance
that they were hoping to get out of the social media campaigns.

A research showed that, only 1
per cent of online transaction could be generated through social media. At the
same time, there was a great contribution of Search Engine Marketing for
e-commerce sites for lead generation, sales and representing 31.43 percent of
sales traffic. E-mail marketing had 2.82 percent and social media just had 1.55
percent of all e-commerce traffic.

It doesn't mean that social media
failed those businesses, but the marketers failed to understand how to use and
optimize social media in their respective businesses. If a business makes use
of social media, it should generate genuine people who’d get engaged in the
activities and trends put by the business. Social media is not about adopting
give-away campaigns like “Win iPad” and converting people who want to win,
follow the brand using social media such as Twitter and Facebook. This will not
bring in genuine fans or leads. The business will face a decline in the
engagement due to not implementing a perfect strategy that suits social media
which will lead to generating the leads and actually the genuine ones.

Another trend flowed in Asia is to put Paid Ads (PPC) to be focused of the search
engine marketing and not concentrating on the SEO. It might be because of the assumption
made by the people of SEO getting too harder. But if a website is healthy and
well optimized, more than half of website traffic can be fetched through
organic search results. One can easily get traffic to a website if SEO
strategies shall be implemented properly and following rules and regulations of
search engines and rather focusing on paid ads.

Social media, Paid ads and SEO
have their own different roles in the digital marketing field and despite of
adopting these techniques one over another, try bringing all together and
implementing it in the business which results in bringing business goals
closer.

To collaborate the above 3
techniques, a business shall make use of the following 6 steps:

·Behavior of Audience in Search and Social Media

It is really necessary to
understand how people behave on search engines and social media, such as what
people search for, in search engine and social media. For that, a marketer has
to look and analyze own website so that relevant audiences can b targeted according
to their needs and purposes.

·Setting up goals for search engines and social
media

Set up the search and social
media goals, once a marketer have well understood the audience and adjusting it
according to the digital marketing projects.

·Using maximum advantage of social media on SEO

The social activities that is
being performed by social media has a greater impact on search engine and a
marketer should take maximum advantage of social media on search engine
optimization, so that improvement can be brought in the organic search performance.

·Combine search and social media

A marketer goes wrong as far as
they consider search and social media to be different. A marketer shall create
a cross-functional process between the search and social so that you can
integrate the search learning into social media, and the social media learning
into search.

·Implement the best practice and influence people
to follow it

Give a shape to the findings,
research, goals and process and implement it and enforce the people across the
world to follow it.